He had started his career a little over a decade earlier at the wheel of a Fiat 1100cc touring car, winning his class on the 1957 Mille Miglia. He then continued to develop his reputation with some consistently respectable showings in an OSCA sports car. He also developed into one of the most accomplished hillclimb drivers in the business at a time when the participation of Ferrari and Porsche made this a very popular area of the sport, particularly in Europe. Scarfiotti won the European Mountain Championship in 1962 and 1965 with Ferrari Dino sports cars.

He made his Formula 1 debut in 1963, standing in for the injured Willy Mairesse and finished sixth in the Dutch Grand Prix, a couple of weeks after sharing the Le Mans winning Ferrari 250P with Lorenzo Bandini. A week later he crashed the Formula 1 car at Reims during practice for the French Grand Prix and suffered leg injuries. For the next two seasons he was only an occasional member of the Ferrari Formula 1 squad, but was reinstated alongside Mike Parkes and Bandini in 1966 after John Surtees quit the team in mid-season. At Monza in September he came through to overcome an early problem to win a classic victory in the Italian Grand Prix.

Despite the success he was retained only on an intermittent basis by Ferrari but after Bandini was killed and Parkes was badly injured in a crash at Spa in 1967 Scarfiotti decided that he had had enough of Ferrari. He returned to Formula 1 in 1968 as a member of the Cooper-BRM team. In addition he became a Porsche driver in the European Mountain Championship and was practising at the Rossfeld hillclimb in Bavaria when his Bergspyder went off the road and into a clump of trees. The fatal accident was blamed on a technical failure.